Preaching the Gospel… to Ourselves

Psalms 42:5, 11, 43:4
“Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him,
my salvation and my God.”

When I first started reading the Bible after becoming a Christian, I was blown away by its raw honesty, and its straightforward, marrow piercing bluntness. I soon learned, as I had already suspected, that God does not mess around, that He does not confuse tolerance (ignoring sin) with grace (taking sin upon Himself for those who repent and trust in His Son, Jesus Christ, 2 Cor 5:21). When sin occurs, discipline (convicting correction) is reserved for His children, where justice (impartial penalty) is reserved for everyone else. In other words, sin must be paid for… either on the cross (two thousand years ago in Palestine), or in the future… in hell.

This is why we (Christians) must evangelize. People are going to hell.

Look at how God cautions of the failure of not warning those who need to be warned:

Ezekiel 33:2-6
“Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.”

The passage does not say, “With the failure of the watchman to do his duty, the people will avoid being taken in their iniquity.” It’s quite the opposite. It says that the person kept from warning is still “taken away in his iniquity.” It also says that the watchman who fails to warn, it is on his hand that the blood of the un-warned will be. Preaching the Gospel, the warning of the impending judgement and the proclaiming of who Christ is and what He did on the cross two thousand years ago in Palestine, is our main function. But, it is not only for the unbeliever. It is also for us…

Psalms 42:5, 11, 43:4
“Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him,
my salvation and my God.”

The psalmist demonstrates what we must constantly also be doing…

“Preaching the Gospel… to Ourselves”

We must be ever repeating to ourselves where our hope lies. If we don’t, our souls will be “cast down” and “turmoil” will be within us. We must remind ourselves to “hope in God” and to say, “I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.” We must be, in a sense, a watchman to ourselves.

Paul lays out what such looks like in his letter to the Romans…

Romans 6:5-11 (HCSB)
“For if we have been joined with Him in the likeness of His death, we will certainly also be in the likeness of His resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that sin’s dominion over the body may be abolished, so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is freed from sin’s claims. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him, because we know that Christ, having been raised from the dead, will not die again. Death no longer rules over Him. For in light of the fact that He died, He died to sin once for all; but in light of the fact that He lives, He lives to God. So, you too consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”